Learn Lessons from the Pale Blue Dot

I just want to share this picture of our earth taken from a distance by Voyager 1. According to Wikipedia, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990 to turn around the space to photograph the planets of the solar system. This is one of the images returned by the voyager described as a “pale blue dot” in the grainy photo.

Carl Sagan revealed the deeper meaning of this photograph in a commencement address delivered on May 11, 1996:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Lessons Learned:
I guess I don’t have to explain the deeper meaning of this dot because it was well reflected by Carl Sagan. But I want to iterate the lesson that we should learn from this dot: We should not let conceit overcome our humility because we live in a tiny place that sits in vast universe made by the greatest creator, God Almighty.

Filed under: Astronomy, Reflections by admin

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